Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award for her poetry. The poems in this issue will appear in Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments, edited by Alice Quinn, to be published this month by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (March 2006)

IN THE REVIEW

Syllables Whatever there was, or is, of love let it be obeyed: —so that the grandfather mightn’t have been blinded, the river never dwindled to what it is now, nor the leaning big willows above it been blighted, nor its trout been fished out; nor, …

Carlos Drummond de Andrade is usually considered the best of the older generation of Brazilian poets. He was born in the little town of Itabirito, in the State of Minas Gerais. As his name indicates, he has Scotch blood, and oddly enough, mineiros, people from the state of Minas (“mines”) …

I never met Flannery O’Connor, but we had been exchanging occasional letters for the last eight years or so. She invited me to visit her at “Andalusia” in Milledgeville, and how deeply I regret now that I never did. The closest I got to it was once when a freighter …

Like a first coat of whitewash when it’s wet, the thin gray mist lets everything show through: the black boy Balthazár, a fence, a horse, a foundered house, —cement and rafters sticking from a dune. (The Company passes off these white but shopworn …